Friday, January 16, 2015

Endangered Forest Owlet now sighted in Madhya Pradesh Jungles too!

There
is more good news about a bird specie that was considered lost by
ornithologists in India. Just a month ago I had reported that in the
month of October 2014, Sunil Laad, a naturalist and former employee
of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) had seen a forest Owlet in
the Tansa sanctuary near Mumbai.

Forest
owlet (Heteroglaux blewitti) is one of the rarest and least-known of
India’s endemic bird species that was thought to be extinct for
over 100 years. It was rediscovered in 1997 in Toranmal Reserve
Forest near Shahada in the Satpuda ranges in Nandurbar District,
Maharashtra. Another bird sighting was reported from here in 2004.
There is only one report of a Forest Owlet sighting in Yawal Wildlife
Sanctuary located in the Yawal Tehsil of Jalgaon district of
Maharashtra and also in the Melghat Tiger reserve in Amaravati,
Maharashtra.

Forest
owlet’s preferred habitat is the dry deciduous teak forests of the
Narmada Valley in the Satpuda ranges though none were sighted in the
recent past. It is now believed that a fragmented population of
between 100 and 250 forest owlets only is now left in the wild,
mainly because of the threats to then forests themselves.

Wildlife
Research and Conservation Society (WRCS),
established September 2005, is a non-profit organization based in
Pune, Maharashtra. WRCS works on issues related to conservation of
wildlife, forests and biodiversity. Their areas of interest include
ecological studies, wildlife population monitoring, human-wildlife
interactions, community-oriented conservation initiatives and habitat
conservation and restoration. They have recently taken up a project
of 3 year duration to study ecology of Forest Owlets under which
research focused on ecological aspects of the species is being taken
up.

Betul
district is an adjoining district to Khandwa district in Madhya
Pradesh state of India, which was known to be an existing Forest
Owlet habitat. WRCS has been carrying out a long-term ecological
study on the Forest Owlet in the Khandwa district. Betul district
forest officials suggested to the society to carry out a Forest Owlet
survey in their district because trees in the area were going to be
cleared in that area as a part of scientific forest management and
forest officials wanted to confirm whether the area was a habitat for
the bird so that additional precautions could be taken. Society was
skeptical because similar surveys in the same area in 2005 and in May
2014 had drawn blank

Anyhow,
society started the three day survey at the forest officer's
insistence. On the last day of the survey, the research team located
an Owlet at a location, where the bird has not been spotted so far.
The society feels that they have a positive finding, because the
survey was carried out in winter, whereas earlier surveys were done
in summer.

The
society had submitted a proposal earlier for such a survey to be
carried out in Toranmal, where the bird was previously spotted in
2004. The Maharashtra state forest department, perhaps encouraged by
sightings in Tansa and Betul, have decided to commission a study on
the status of the Forest Owlet not only in the wildlife sanctuaries
in Toranmal, but also at Yawal and have since asked the society to
extend the study to Yawal also.